


A Quartz's Habit

by Aniyha



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Aradia And Sollux Have Personalities, Dream Bubbles (Homestuck), F/M, Not Canon Compliant, Quadrants Are Fake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26711035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aniyha/pseuds/Aniyha
Summary: When Aradia reveals her concerns about the timeline and her place in it, it’s Sollux’s turn to be the therapist of the duo.
Relationships: Sollux Captor/Aradia Megido
Comments: 11
Kudos: 14





	A Quartz's Habit

**Author's Note:**

> I've been in the Homestuck fandom for A While, but this is my first fanfic, so go easy on me, I guess? I started this back in May while running on quarantine brain. Aradia's character arc is a really wild one, but it always felt like she was more oriented towards change in her physical forms, as opposed to growing as a person. This is a goddamn shame. Consider this my middle finger to how cheated she was in her arc, as well as to the concept of relevancy itself.

Ever since they left on their joint adventure and vacation, there had been a single, buzzing question in the mind of a certain maroonblood. With each step they took in the shifting sands of time, floating with purpose from dreamlike location to actual dream, it burned within her until she had to ask herself.

How many sweeps had it been?

It was a rhetorical question. Aradia already knew how long it had been: One sweep, three perigees, one week, four nights, five hours, seventeen minutes, and sixteen point three seconds repeating, ever since the moment of inquiry.

Aradia was a fan of getting to tell time so precisely, and without having a computer for a body, too!

There were so many things that she got to be happy about again! Every time she remembered, she couldn’t help but take it all in. She loved the shimmer of her wings, fluttering with an intensity that hadn’t faded since the moment of her resurrection. She loved the way everything changed from bubble to bubble, even from thought to thought, as they all worked to shape the landscape into new adventures. She loved the feeling of Sollux’s arm being hooked with hers, despite his insistence that she would ‘get over it’ eventually.

They were still together, of course. Walking this time, because she wanted to walk rather than passively float above everything she wanted to be a part of. As they left footprint tracks in the sand, the desert they had been trudging along in became bordered by a luminescent blue. The sun that baked the sand underneath their feet instead began to reflect in the crystalline ground, flicking the light off of sharpened points directly into her vision. Sollux was spared this eyestrain, as he did not have eyes.

“Going up now,” Aradia spoke pleasantly, a ringing in her words like the wind-powered noisemakers that one might hang in their hive. Exercising her telekinesis, she flew up with her wings while lifting Sollux along with her.

“Get tired of crawling through that miserable desert? Thank fuck.” He started speaking as she lifted him into the air. He used to tense when she lifted him, but his voice stopped hitching at the sensation a few perigees ago.

“No, we just reached the end of it.”

“So where are we now?”

“Nowhere important, but the terrain is uneven, and I don’t want you falling flat on your face--”

“It was one time, AA! A guy falls into a dune one time and you harp on him for the rest of his dubious life over it.”

Aradia snorted. “Come on, you’re being a wiggler. You were the one who insisted you could go two minutes without being guided, and in a desert, no less!”

“Yeah, yeah, rub it in.” Sollux didn’t speak back up immediately, and Aradia was more than comfortable to continue her light chuckling. The sound refracted against the crystals like how the light had, but they were now deep enough into the memory that the desert sun had been replaced with more ambient lighting.

Comfortable silence was their standard. Sometimes, after Aradia had gotten to help a ghost, she would continue to talk about them after leaving their particular memory. On occasion, Sollux would crack a joke that would lead to conversation for the next few minutes. This time, they stayed quiet for a handful of moments, Aradia’s eyes looking over the landscape until she spoke back up.

“It doesn’t seem like anybody is around,” Aradia noted, half to herself, half to Sollux.

“Great. Let’s get out of here then, whatever or wherever the fuck it is.”

Aradia didn’t respond immediately. Instead, she hummed a melodic tune that vibrated her thorax in place of words. When she did speak back up, it was when something caught her eye amidst the quartz spires.

“Wait, this is perfect. I want to look around!” She started floating them down mid-speech, which made Sollux tense a little out of surprise. It didn’t last long, as he relaxed when they touched the grassy ground. Crystals lined the perimeter between themselves and the lawnring, forming a sea of nature’s knives that pointed inward, all towards the hive that was at the true center.

“At least give me the play-by-play,” Sollux muttered, his brows furrowed as he looked up in Aradia’s general direction.

“Not yet.” Aradia smiled particularly wide at him, and despite being blind, Sollux could tell this immediately.

“All right, then. Keep your secrets.” He shrugged to himself before being guided inside. He could tell it was indoors from the change to tile from grass, and part of him relished the relief of a level walking surface. Not that he could fault an adventurer for wanting to tough it out in harsher memories, but he had never been the type. It had always been easier to fly over that nonsense. Emphasis on had.

“I’m going to do some digging around,” Aradia explained, unhooking her arm from Sollux’s. “Feel free to hang out, I guess? I’ll be back in five minutes and forty-three seconds.” With that, he was left with nothing but the sound of footsteps and the creak of a door as it was opened and shut.

Sollux leaned back against the nearest wall and let out a mental groan, dipping his head back until it made contact. Six minutes to be alone with his thoughts, not that it felt much different when many of them were things he could never say to his ever-present guide. He had to preface his mental ramblings with a disclaimer, one that said that he still appreciated finally getting to hang out with Aradia again, but there were some caveats there that he wished he didn’t have to consider.

Externally, he was doing his best to play it cool, in case he lost track of how long six minutes was while enveloped in his thoughts. He leaned up against the wall, arms crossed, his face pointed down towards the floor. He knew that he could never look particularly ‘cool’, but aloof would have to do. 

Back to that particular train of thought, packed to the brim with cans of soil invertebrates. Sollux knew that he could be emotionally challenged at times, but at least he was more capable of letting go after what had happened on the meteor. Aradia, on the other hand… He had no idea how to read her. Communicating with psychics, especially while being a psychic himself, had been frustrating enough. Ever since she got her body back, as well as the perks of godhood, she somehow felt more distant than before. At least when she was stuck in that smoochbot, she was physically and emotionally distant. Now that they had been attached at the hip for so long, it hurt more to have to experience it firsthand.

Just thinking about Aradia in those harsh terms made Sollux want to rip his hair out in frustration. He wasn’t even sure if he was interpreting her correctly, or if he was just being an asshole. Was it wrong for him to expect her to be as fucked up as he had been from everything that had happened? Was it bad to think that she was capable of expressing more than a single emotion, but was trying to do so anyway-- just like when she had been a ghost, but swapping apathy with happiness? Why couldn’t he just be grateful for once in his miserable existence instead of overthinking everything? They talked about so much in the early perigees of her going God Tier, but they hadn’t run out of important things to say. At least, he was pretty sure they hadn’t. He ran his hands against his face, rubbing at the skin as if he could scrub the feeling away.

A distraction. He needed a distraction. Feeling against the wall, he used one hand to keep grounded to it while walking away from the door they had come in through. He kicked his foot out a little farther than normal to test if he was about to bump into something, and after walking in one of the dumbest ways possible for three steps, he tapped the toe of his shoe into a solid surface.

Reaching out with his hands, the horizontal surface he felt told him that he hadn’t just made his way into a corner. He felt the surface for anything that he might be able to use to keep his unkempt nails from digging into his fingers out of anxious habit, but the side of his hand bumped into something plastic instead. A husktop keyboard, he confirmed after letting his fingers brush against the keys. It felt kind of nice, but he didn’t want to give Aradia any more ammunition to tease him with than he already had.

Sollux started rummaging through the drawers of the desk next. The top one had what he guessed was a book on top, but given the good that it would do him, he shut the drawer and moved on to the next. The middle one struck his interest, as the first thing his fingertips touched were the smooth facets of a small item. A die? His bloodpusher skipped a beat, and his grip tightened on the item for a moment before he started rolling it in his hand with purpose. One, two, three… Six sides.

Wait.

Didn’t Aradia use to have dice like these?

Aradia’s wings flitted in the air for a moment after she closed the door behind her. A buzzing sound from the vibrations of the thin, semi-translucent chitin sounded off, bouncing off of the walls of her old respiteblock. It was a humble thing: Suitable for maroons such as herself, it had everything necessary to live, and nothing more. The light of the crystals filtered through the single grid window, which in turn illuminated the lone recouperacoon at the back wall. The slime was too shallow to dunk her head in fully. Especially now, considering she had grown since she was six sweeps of age. 

But none of that was what she was there for.

A medium-sized mass of white was curled up in the corner, just next to the ‘coon, its body moving up and down to the rhythm of its breathing. Carefully, Aradia tip-toed over to the creature, crouching down and extending a hand to it only to rest a palm against its spine. 

Her lusus untucked its head from its body and looked up to see her charge. 

“Yeah, it’s me.”

With a soft expulsion of air, the kangaram turned her snout over towards the door.

“I have company. You remember him, right?”

She nodded.

“I had him wait a bit so that I could see you again. And no, he doesn’t know. I think he would feel guilty about the whole thing, even though everyone lost their lusii eventually.” 

Aradia pressed her lips together. She began thoughtfully stroking her hand down her lusus’ pelt before speaking again. “There are so many stories that I want to tell you, but they’re going to have to wait a bit. Something important is going to happen here. Something that I would much rather avoid, but it seems as inevitable as anything else that has happened.”

Her lusus tilted her head with a sparkle in her eyes that Aradia inherited. 

“It’s a little too complicated for you, but don’t worry. Everything will turn out ok.”

Aradia ended her petting motion with a soft head pat, then stood back up to her full height. Her lusus raised her head slightly before lowering it back down to rest atop her body.

“Five minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” she told herself under her breath. Her count also included the time necessary to walk back to the door and open it back up. She gave one last look at her lusus while her hand was on the doorknob, then turned it to see what Sollux was up to while she had left him.

With his hand in her desk, her keyboard askew, and one of her dice in his claws, it was pretty easy to figure out what had happened. 

“I guess I don’t have to tell you where you are now.” His body tensed at the sound of her voice, making him clutch the die a little tighter than he had intended. The sound of the door opening had escaped his thinkpan in his focus, giving her the perfect opportunity to walk back in on him. “Should I have put my stuff in a treasure chest so you could hold it all above your head and hum a tune when you found it?”

Sollux furrowed his eyebrows. “AA, no.”

“Well, I thought it was funny.”

She was still smiling. Sollux could hear it in her voice.

He hated that he felt more of an impotent annoyance at that fact than the joy that he ought to be feeling.

“You can keep it if you want. It isn’t like I’ll be FLARPing anytime soon.” She paused thereafter, a cessation of sound that was more out of politeness than out of having run out of things to say. “Have you been feeling anxious again?”

“No shit,” he murmured harmlessly, still pressing the smooth faces of the die into his fingertips. The material-- some kind of crystal, he guessed-- felt cool and comfortable. “What are we doing at your hive? We’ve never stopped here before. Fuck, I thought that you were avoiding the place.”

“I thought you might have wanted to take a break from all the movement,” Aradia half-lied. It was part of her rationale, but not the whole truth.

“Yeah, but why here?” His tone pitched up a little higher than he had intended it to. He was already stressed enough from his barely staved-off breakdown. The last thing he needed was to have to navigate an actual conversation.

“If there are too many… painful memories here, we can leave.” She still wasn’t answering the question. It was out of a more immediate concern for his well being, most likely, but he still couldn’t shake the feeling that she was just being cagey again. 

“No, that’s not the reason-- AA, answer the question, why are we at your hive? You can just tell me if I’m reading too deeply into this. Fuck, actually, please do.” To Aradia, he probably just looked like he was about to flip his shit. Maybe he was. But damn if he didn’t want some answers while simultaneously flipping his shit. 

Aradia’s brows furrowed. It had been a while since Sollux showed such visible tension. With a concerned expression on her face that he wouldn’t be able to see, she started to slowly approach him. “Sollux, take some deep breaths.” Her tone was tranquil. “In and out in counts of four.” Clinical. “It is going to be okay.”

Robotic.

“No!” He turned to her approximate location to yell, muscles taut. “You always say that like it’s going to fucking do something, but you don’t just get ‘okayness’ knocked into you-- or, or ‘not okayness’ knocked out of you like it’s some Boolean fucking value! We’ve been through some shit! You’ve been through some shit! Actually, ‘some’ isn’t even a proper modifier for the amount of pure, grade-A hoofbeast manure you’ve been wading through horns deep since hatching, and yet here I am, going off on my feelings like paradox space’s biggest fuck-up!” 

“Sollux, breathe.” It was a practiced tone, the kind that might invoke the mental image of a therapist if either of them knew what a therapist was. The kind that she used when endlessly consoling the dead over their problems.

“No, don’t you fucking dare go Grub-Mart greeter on me! Let me…” He let out a puff of air through his nose to punctuate his trailed off sentence. “Let me not drag everything into the gaping black hole that is my emotional state for once.” He caught his tone and lowered it, sounding more exasperated than angry. His fingers ran through his hair as he started choosing his words with care, while Aradia started twirling a strand of her hair around one of her fingers.

“When we met back up and you started doing your whole psychopomp fairy routine, I thought that, I don’t know, you’d turn some of that advice of yours inwards? You kept on talking about growth being a process and putting yourself in a place that will let you do that, yet you seem to be hellbent on convincing yourself that you’ve reached your final form. Like, this is it!” He started pitching his tone up, losing the hollow quirk that he had picked up the moment she had set it down, “this is Aradia Prime, here to save all the lost souls of the dream bubbles without batting a fucking eye!”

“Sollux, what--”

“I’m not done! Do you think I don’t have a clue how exhausting it is to pull that shit with a single version of myself? Because I do. And you’re going around pulling that shit with every doomed version of me out there! Not even to mention the infinite conga line of the rest of our friend group, up to and including the ones that are batshit insane! Fuck, you think I can’t tell how good it makes you feel to indulge your fetish for omission? Of only ever discussing other people’s problems so you can avoid whatever’s obviously eating you? I’m fucking blind and I can see it!”

He slammed his hand holding the die down onto the desk. The crystalline substance it was made from made a loud noise when struck against the wood so harshly. “So, this is what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna stand there, or float there, or whatever method of immobile posture you want to take, and we’re gonna talk about you. Not me, not the alternate dead assholes, not the living assholes. You. And I swear to the god of double death, if you try to avoid this, I’m pulling up a memory of one of your excavation sites just to fall and die in.”

For a long, empty, horrifying moment, neither Sollux nor Aradia spoke back up. Sollux stayed quiet from an unwillingness to back down on his point, and Aradia was too busy staring wide-eyed at her friend making such a declaration. She was caught by utter surprise, her lips pressed thin like an underscore, and it was only after a few more moments of staying still with such a facial expression that she started speaking.

“This is… awfully pale of you.” She spoke slowly, deliberately, having gone off-script after over a sweep of thought out motivational speeches and well-timed words of comfort.

“AA, I am well and fucking beyond the point of being worried about dancing around that particular nugget of drama. We can get to it when we get to it,” he huffed as he pressed his back to the wall and lowered himself down to sit, “but for now, at least entertain the idea.”

Another pause, but one punctuated with footsteps as Aradia walked up to sit next to Sollux. Her wings were still fluttering gently, leaving immaterial waves of maroon dust in their wake until they were pressed flat against the wall. She sat with her legs crossed while Sollux had his legs stretched out, one knee bent to give him a place to rest an elbow. “Ok, what about myself do you want to talk about specifically?” Her tone was comforting again, and Sollux felt like she was thinking about this in terms of helping him, not herself.

Even still, he felt the need to talk about it. He had buried himself this deep, so he might as well keep digging. “You just, you went so fast, you know? One second you were a moody tin can that somehow had feelings, not that I get that, and the next you’re perfectly happy like nothing had ever happened in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, you’re the strongest troll I know, but nobody can go through that much and come out the other side ‘ok’.” He made air quotes, then moved to cross his arms and turn away from her. It was in part from habit, but also to hide the light golden blush that tinted his face when he spoke so candidly.

Aradia didn’t hesitate this time. “I truly am this happy to be alive. More than words could ever express! Every second that passes by, I get to feel the weight of a real body again, the pulse of my bloodpusher beating anew, and it fills me with so much hope!”

“I know, and I’m not saying you should go back to being fucking miserable or anything, just… Fuck, this is gonna sound stupid, but you know you’re allowed to feel emotions other than saccharine euphoria, right?”

“I am pretty sure the emotion I am feeling right now is better described as confusion. Have I seemed like I haven’t been doing well as of late?”

Sollux made a long, pained groaning sound, his head tilting up towards the ceiling as if to release the noise into the atmosphere. “It’s not that, it’s that you’re doing so well it somehow loops back around to being unhealthy. All you do is go around begging all the used up extra lives to give you their tragic backstories. I get that you’re a god now with no need for any of that mortal shit like food, or sleep, or taking a break that might consist of, causality forbid, standing still for a couple of fucking minutes, but that doesn’t mean that you should wholesale abandon all of those things.”

Aradia’s tongue darted out to wet her lips, as they had suddenly become dry. “I don’t see what I do as some kind of job or obligation that might require me to take a step back from it.”

“Exactly!” The die clattered onto the floor at the same time he clapped his hands. The two sounds rang in the memory hive for a fraction of a second, but their impact was felt all the same. “This is what I’m talking about! What the fuck is going on, AA? Is this, like, some kind of coping mechanism or something?”

“...You’re worried.”

“If this is your attempt to get me to drop it just from pointing out the obvious, it isn’t going to work,” Sollux deadpanned.

He could hear the way her fingers brushed through her hair. It was always something: Talking to ghosts, spinning strands of her hair with her fingers, getting out tangles with her nails. It reminded him of before the game when he would fly over to visit her and stay the day. She had never been able to stay still then, either.

“It’s cruel, isn’t it?” Aradia cut through the silence. She was picking at a tangle near her shoulder with her index finger and thumb. “The way the timelines work. Inevitable, yes, but inevitability and cruelty are not mutually exclusive. Some might even venture to guess that they are mutually inclusive.”

She looked back up at Sollux, who was giving her a few small nods of encouragement. 

“I want to be able to balance that. To take the harm that has been done and reshape it into something better. Growth, acceptance, remembrance. I have been hoping to grow from this, too. There is so much that goes into being alive that…” Her words hung in the air. She started to focus more on untangling the knot in her hair. She took so long to select what she wanted to say next that Sollux tried doing so for her.

“That you’re afraid you’re gonna fuck something up? That’s literally the living experience, AA. Hell, ever since the concept of permanent death got thrown out the view portal, that’s been the dead experience, too.”

“Not exactly,” she responded after some hesitation.

“Not exactly to what?”

“The ‘dead experience’ part. The dead function differently to the living. This much is obvious when said out loud, but the extent to which not only the physiology differs, but the psychology? That can be jarring and difficult to understand at first blush.”

Sollux sighed, figuring that he ought to take what he could get when it came to Aradia’s penchant for omitting things. She gave him enough with her verbal dodge that he knew he had hit the building spike on the head, but for her sake, he would go along with what she was handing to him at face value. For now. 

“You’d be surprised at how much I’m willing to try to understand after going through that fucking fiasco of a game you made me code.”

“I suppose so. I’ve never tried to explain this before…” She trailed off, her eyes looking down to the familiar floor of what was once her hive. “It was always something so self-evident. At least, to me, it was. I might need a moment to gather my thoughts.”

“I’ll be here. It isn’t like I have much choice otherwise. What am I gonna do, get up and bang my head against the nearest wall?” Sollux smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand for emphasis. “Chip a horn while I’m at it?” 

Aradia chuckled. It was a hollow sound. “Maybe if I just start now, I’ll manage to bump into what I intend to say.”

“Whatever floats your metaphorical boat.”

“Okay. When I was dead, I was much more in tune with the inevitability of events. I still am, of course, but back in those nights, there was a pervasive feeling that went into them. Not just one of hollowness, or defeatism, as intertwined into the experience as they are.” She stopped for a moment to mull over her thoughts, then to sigh, still unbelieving that she was talking about something so tender.

Sollux did not offer to fill in the dead air her sigh left in its wake. That, she would have to do herself.

“I… There was a purpose to it all. Of knowing exactly where to go. Point A was here, and to get to Point B, all you had to do was this, this, and that. I’m sure it didn’t look so easy to the rest of you, but with the voices as my guides, I didn’t need anything else.”

She looked back at Sollux. He looked as if he was deep in thought, with his brows furrowed and chapped lips pressed together unevenly. To her, he looked concerned. To him, she was finally starting to decompile, showing any bugs in her once obfuscated lines of code, and maybe if he kept likening this to something that he had more than a single goddamn brain cell dedicated to, he could stop internally freaking out about it.

“Not that I need to have something like that! To me, this has never been about recognition. You know this. What I’m trying to say is that it got me used to the feeling of... relevancy.” The word tasted sour on her tongue. She tried to wash it out with more words. “Of being part of something greater than myself, and contributing to the timeline.” The sourness lingered still. She started speaking faster to compensate.

“Now, I do still feel as if I am contributing, but the role is diminishing. This is the tricky part. As much as I want to be able to go back and fill the strange niche I had found myself in before, tied to by fate, the strings have been pulling me into a direction that worries me. On an existential level.”

This was enough to break Sollux’s silence. “An existential level?” He needed more information. He felt like he was scrolling too far into the code, 3 PM and wired and in no state to hear what he was about to hear.

“Haven’t you noticed a pattern?” Aradia’s voice became breathy, and if Sollux wasn’t starting to project his anxiety onto her and her tone, he might have attributed fear to it. He tried to gulp, but his mouth was too dry for it.

“Relevancy to the timeline, perceived or real, has played a major role in longevity. Contributions to their schemes have been traded in like scarabs to the old gods. What happens when someone has nothing left to offer? When what they hold dear is seen as useless to the fickle writers of the universe?”

She hadn’t blinked for a while. She was happy that Sollux couldn’t tell.

“Their potential, their raw energy is taken and redistributed to those who have shouldered the gods’ burden. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. The meteor was more than a simple culling, and the dream bubbles are but a small mercy for those who have had any potential for growth sucked out of them. Every ghost here has become an insect cast in amber, frozen in time, but I thought that if I adapted my goals so that I might be able to represent them, to hold their stories so that they might have a chance to live in a different form, that would be enough. I no longer think this is the case.”

Aradia stopped to take a breath, but Sollux interjected before she could start back up again. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, do you-- do you think that you’re gonna die again?” 

Her response was immediate and feverish. “No. Yes. This death is a different death. While it can result in a literal loss of life, more often than not, it’s more like an ego death. A loss of all things but a label, and a loose set of surface-level values. In a way, it can be worse than physical death, as even that can hold relevance within the timeline. This used to be the case with myself, and how my death was meant to orchestrate events, rather than act as divine punishment.” 

She stopped to allow Sollux to get in a word edgewise, but he shoved in a sentence instead. “AA, no offense, but I mean this sincerely when I say that you sound like you’re seconds away from showing me your tinfoil hat collection and a bunch of red string connecting pictures on a wall.” 

Aradia said nothing as she waited for his thoughts to catch up with his mouth.

“Fuck, okay, that was a horrible thing to say, and I’m sorry for it. Just, what the fuck am I supposed to--” He stopped himself before he started complaining in front of her again. There she was, spilling her deepest fears about life, death, and the universe, and he was breaking down already and looking at jokes for comfort. Fuck. 

“Look, I thought that we had made it. After all the bullshit that the game threw at us like we were a pair of chumps locked in the miscellaneous beast enclosure for the day, we’d get to, like, take a fucking break. So, I’m kind of floored that the local timeline guru and goddess of the stuff has just told me that she’s somehow cosmically fucked anyway? Can I be forgiven for that, maybe?”

“I was never mad.” Her voice sounded like it was on the verge of returning to its old, hollow affect. 

“I figured. So, is there any way of avoiding this?” 

“...Potentially. But the events are so far that I’m struggling to get a bead on them.”

“Far into the future? Then why even worry about it right now?”

“No, it’s physically far. A universe away far. Temporally, it’s pretty close.”

Sollux groaned, dragging his fingers up his face until his hands covered it entirely. “God, not this shit again.” 

“I know. For the record, you aren’t under any obligation to… keep doing this for me.” Her fingers made an ineffectual gesture, circling through the air silently. “A lot of this is beyond even my ability to reason with.”

“Fucking-- do what, talk to you like you’re a goddamn person and not the local advice dispenser? Yeah, it’s a lot, but isn’t that what makes it so important to work through? I’m not just gonna let you sweep everything under the rug now that it’s finally out,” he explained, a concerned frustration clear in his tone. “We just have to take this one telekinetic hover at a time.”

“You could have just said step,” Aradia offered.

“Oh my god, we are not getting caught up in this. One step at a time,” Sollux paused in case Aradia started chuckling to herself, which she did. “We can start with the whole interpersonal concerns thing, and work up to that cosmic tangle of fuck-ups.” He gave himself just enough time to take in a breath before speaking again, emboldened and unwilling to lose that courage to taking too long. “Earlier, you never said that you weren’t afraid of fucking up when it came to you being alive. Do you want to add anything to that?”

“I suppose it would help, even if I think it ties into everything else.” Aradia ran her fingers through her hair, feeling the smooth sensation of combing through tangle-free curls. “Wait. Do you want to walk around outside while we do this? My legs are starting to fall asleep from sitting here for so long.” She stood up anyway, moving her arms up to stretch and wake them up from having stayed in the same general position. Shoulders popped, muscles tensed and relaxed, and the encroaching tingling feeling in her feet started going away.

“Sure.” Sollux stood up in turn, then held an arm out for Aradia to hook around. Obligingly, she took him by the hand instead. It would be easier for them to get out of the door together if they weren’t arm-in-arm, but when she led him out of the hive of her memories, neither of them let go.

“I’ve just been so used to the voices and their guidance,” she began, walking side-by-side with him as their shoes brushed against the grass, then clinked against the crystalline ground, “and so much of their advice revolves around events that need to happen to perpetuate the timeline, but it feels… outdated? I mean, if we were anywhere else in the bubbles, we would be up to our horns in ghosts. All a living person would need to do is fall asleep, and they could commune with them!”

Feeling somewhat less shell-shocked, Sollux spared an uneven smirk. “Or be a bifurcated freak of nature.” 

“That too. Anyway, I was getting off track a little. I’m not mad that the dead are more accessible. I think it’s a great thing! It would be better if I hadn’t already made my feelings about the dream bubbles as a concept clear, but all of our lives have been marked by wading through imperfect systems. I just think that the voices have also deemed themselves outdated, and have thus… Left.”

“Left? What’s your radius like?”

“Not big enough to break through a universe. My guess is that the game’s mechanics take precedence over how spirits worked before. It isn’t like one can have a spirit that I’m capable of communing with alongside a dream bubble ghost. For a while, it was ok, since I could talk to pre-prototyped versions of myself while they were still proper ghosts. But then that was replaced by the Road to the Undoing, and then once that outlived its usefulness, nothing. That was when I first became concerned about potential.”

“And about your place in the timeline. Sheesh, yeah, it really is all connected then.” Sollux was beginning to feel like he was in over his head. Well, that was a lie. He had felt like that a million times before, and it was just creeping back in on the edges of his pan, like a migraine that refused to go away.

“Yeah,” Aradia placidly responded.

Sollux kept quiet, trying to think over what he wanted to tell her. There was no sentence or set of premade dialogue options that would single-handedly take away all of her fear, but he still wished that he could get close enough. The silence was starting to leave a ringing in his aural clots, so he decided to cut through it. Buying time from a troll who was made of time.

“You never did tell me where we are. This doesn’t sound like your lawnring.” He stepped with a little more force than necessary against the hard ground for effect.

“It’s my land. Quartz and Melody?” 

“Oh. That makes sense. Wish I could see it.” He brought up another topic to try and keep her mind off of worrying so much. When he thought of something to say, he could loop back around then.

“Honestly, it’s rather plain, like a massive geode you can’t get out of. On first blush it’s gorgeous, I can give it that, but I wish there had been a little more to it.”

“Maybe there was? We did speedrun the game like a bunch of pros. Some of us more than others, obviously.” Fuck, what did you even tell the troll who knew what to tell everyone but herself? 

“Maybe. Quartz was pretty common back on Alternia, but there’s also a lot of kinds of it. It could have been nice to get to explore a little more and find those potential kinds instead of all this clear quartz.” She stopped the two of them at the outer ring of crystals, tinged an ethereal blue in the light. Her nail experimentally tapped against the formation, as if something would happen if she did. “There could have been a whole underground area, like some sort of hidden depths, or some kind of way to affirm a greater interest than surface level.” 

She wasn’t talking about her land anymore, was she? Okay, that was okay. He could work with this, even if her way of jumping around topics was frustrating.

“Well,” Sollux’s voice cut through the air experimentally, appraising the silence that came after before continuing, “what’s stopping you from making some modifications?”

“What?” Aradia responded, sounding as if she had never had the thought before.

“What’s stopping you from telling this bubble that you want a goddamn underground zone in your land? You could just, I don’t know, think of some caverns that you’ve been to before. Copy-paste them in. Easy.” He moved his hand forward as if miming the action of pushing something, making his palm tap against the body of the crystal in front of them. 

Aradia didn’t want to admit that it felt wrong to impose her own experiences onto the dream bubbles. It was so much more interesting getting to see what everyone else had to offer! Sollux wouldn’t be a fan of such an answer, however. It would only incriminate her thought processes all over again.

“I can give it a try,” she offered. She slipped her hand out from holding Sollux’s, pressed both against the crystal that he had just touched, and began to let her thoughts wander. Focusing would do nothing in the domain of dreams. If she could corral her thoughts to a place of understanding, granting herself a deep desire that she had thought of as selfish, surely the dream bubbles would reward such a thing. 

There she went, attributing things like logic and desire to not even the higher powers, but the bubbles which they blew, but it was difficult to get out of the habit at this point.

Half a minute in, spelunking her subconscious for unity between the real and the unreal, between relevancy and irrelevancy, Aradia pressed her forehead to the edge of the crystal. It was dull enough, or she pressed lightly enough, that it did not hurt her. Her eyes were closed. Sollux was waiting idly, mentally hoping that whatever she was doing, the end of it would be marked with a loud enough noise that he could react alongside her. 

It was silent. A full minute in, Aradia only opened her eyes when she felt the crystal that was in front of her fade out of existence. It was there one moment, partially out of reality in another, and in the next, gone. A gasp escaped her when she saw just what she had collaborated with the bubble to make, and the sound was enough to get Sollux to instinctively turn his head towards Aradia. This was as if being faced in a general direction would be enough to notify him of what was going on. 

She had made a tunnel. 

It was a tall and wide tunnel, large enough to be traversable. The slope of it went easily enough that carving stairs from the ground wasn’t necessary, and it went deep enough into the land itself that she couldn’t tell what was at the end. In her opinion, that was the best part. 

The floor was made of a smooth red aventurine that refracted a color identical to that of her veins. The walls were just as smooth, lined with randomized imperfections from iron deposits to mica schists, all running through to what had to be some greater opening. Aradia’s breath caught in her throat, and it was held as her eyes took in the way candles held in carved sconces meshed with the crystals. 

“Play-by-play?” Sollux asked under his breath, more questioning than he normally toned himself to be. He would have been fine if she didn’t want to ruin the moment, but was too curious as to what she had made to stay silent.

“It’s gorgeous,” she breathlessly responded. “It’s a tunnel made of red crystals, cutting deep into the land.” In her initial shock, she had forgotten that she was capable of walking. Taking Sollux’s hand back, she wordlessly notified him that she would begin moving. An out of sync and slow stumble into the tunnel molded into two pairs of footsteps walking in unison. Aventurine blended into axinite blended into citrine. 

Not that she would tell him that much. 

“You can touch the walls without cutting your hand open,” she informed him. Carefully, he reached out his free arm to the side to let his fingertips brush against the cool crystal as they walked. “The real one wasn’t as interesting,” she continued. “It was a trollmade tunnel that I had found while practicing excavation, but made out of packed dirt and rock instead of crystals. It was also much smaller. I had to crawl on my hands and knees to get anywhere in it.” 

Sollux raised an eyebrow, the vague memory of hearing about this adventure as it happened having caused it to knock around in his pan. “Wait, is this the one that you got stuck in?” 

“Yeah!” Aradia beamed as brightly as the pair of candles that they crossed. “I had thought that it was the den of some kind of burrowing lusus. It had to have been older than I thought, because of--”

“--Of those bones that you found at the center,” he finished.

“Right, the bones! They had to have cursed me when I gathered them up, or maybe the angle of the tunnel was different going back up than it was going down? It was only when the spirits removed them from my sylladex that I was able to crawl my way back out.”

“Hey, better to leave with no bones than to become a bunch of bones yourself,” Sollux offered with a shrug.

“I suppose so,” Aradia teasingly half-agreed. 

Comfortable silence reached them once more. Their natural state was of travel, of walking from one point to another while carefully minding the passage of time. While Aradia wound the flow of time around them like a tapestry, weaving it just enough so that it wouldn’t affect Sollux too much, Sollux’s reactions to the aspect were more out of rationing the boredom he tended to feel with taking in how much he could hold Aradia’s hand again.

When the tunnel finally let out to an extensive cavern, it made Aradia stop in her tracks, with Sollux following suit a step later. 

“Sollux,” Aradia breathed out, eyes wide as she took in the sight of the cavern. “There are so many more tunnels, stretching out in all directions. It’s as if this cavern-- we’re in a large cavern now-- is a bloodpusher, and the tunnels stretching out from it are the arteries and veins. Some of the ones at the top are even bringing water down! Can you hear it?” 

“Hardly,” Sollux responded after focusing his hearing for a moment. Whoever said that the other senses become stronger when one was lost was full of shit. 

“Let’s get closer then!” She tugged at his hand to get him to walk with her again, and when he did start walking again, she picked up the pace to a light jog. Their footsteps echoed haphazardly against the cavernous depths. The sound eventually came to overlap with the sound of dozens of small waterfalls feeding into a centralized lake. It was much less like the roar of a single waterfall, and more like many faucets pouring into a natural bowl from a high distance. Some of them fell so smoothly, it looked as if the water itself was suspended in time.

The sight of the natural wonder up close drew a long gasp from Aradia, who was all too eager to sit down again, if only to dip a hand in the clear water. Filtered by intricate underground systems, she could see her fingers clearly while they were submerged, as they were only obscured by the ripples formed upon entry. It was a foreign yet welcome sensation. Large bodies of water were off-limits to all but the highest of bloods back on Alternia. Aradia was only allowed that which was buried, but that was more than enough for her.

“The water is so pure,” she commented for Sollux. “How does it sound now?”

“A lot less loud than I thought it would be. It’s weirdly relaxing,” he answered with a slightly raised lip, as if offended at the prospect of nature being something enjoyable. 

Even the floor, which Sollux had assumed would be cold and unforgiving as a place to sit, seemed to be welcoming. He could hear Aradia pull her hand out of the water and flick the droplets that stuck to her skin back into the pool. He could also hear her give up on drying her hand by that method, and instead wipe it against her god robes. 

They spent a few minutes in that comfortable silence, with Aradia taking in the sights, and Sollux enjoying the opportunity to take a breather. He was still trying to figure out what exactly he could say to her, but she beat him to breaking the silence with her own realization.

“Thank you,” she offered to the cavern air. 

“For what? You did this yourself.” 

“For the push. I couldn’t have done it without you. You are allowed to give yourself some credit, Sollux.”

“I guess,” he partially conceded.

“...This put us on a different path. But you already know that, don’t you?”

“If I said that this was all according to plan in a faux confident voice, would you believe me?”

Aradia smiled. “No, probably not. I appreciate the sentiment anyway.”

“As I was saying,” she continued, “this may not have resolved all of the issues at hand, but it does hold a wonderful fragment of meaning! The architects of fate love symbolism. To be able to take relevancy into our own hands, even hypothetically…” Her pan was racing, but instead of her jumping up and racing off like she normally did, like she thought she would do, she stayed next to the underground lake, and next to Sollux. Her excitement wasn’t waning by any means, but rather, it felt as if it was more tempered. 

“Sollux, there is a beautiful world waiting for everyone at the end.” Her volume was controlled, but her tone retained her characteristic eagerness. “But that world will need help. Those that write the rules will and have already become fractured beyond repair. Relevancy is the key to achieving a final, true victory: An ending composed of beginnings.” The bend of her dimples caught a bit of reflected light as she adjusted herself, more fully facing Sollux, and offering her fingers to slide in the spaces between his. 

As blush dusted on their faces, Sollux opened his hand up just enough to allow Aradia to weave a way closer. He didn’t dare try to interrupt her. Not now. “I want to see that world with you. I want to heal it, I want to explore it, I want to rest in it with you.” Sollux’s eye sockets widened slightly, his nails twitching, threatening to start pressing into skin to make sure that this was real. Aradia’s hand responding in kind by fully holding his was also a suitable method of grounding. “I… I want to mention the other reason that this is so important, while I’m on topic. Not just to the nature of paradox space itself, but to me.

I never thought that I could have anything outside of myself. Wanting more than my own body, my experiences, my adventures, it felt like pressing my luck.” She paused briefly to swallow. Her tongue suddenly felt too thick for her mouth, but she had to keep going. “Even in a scenario without the game being so intertwined in our lives, I think I would have felt the same. We never were promised much, and anything we were allowed to have, we had to make ourselves. Scrounging from the bottom to the lower middle.”

She filled the air back in too quickly to let him answer in any meaningful way. “But I suppose that was just my way of protecting myself. That’s what you were trying to get at, right?” Aradia’s smile went sheepish at the mention. She didn’t have any reason to glance away from him, but she did anyway.

“Actually, I didn’t think we’d get this far.” He spoke lowly, mindful of the way the cavern could make his voice reverberate.

“Neither did I,” she admitted in a whisper of her own. 

Aradia moved in closer, scooting in a way that caused their joined hands to move more towards Sollux, but not to separate. Their legs touched at the same time she raised her free hand to cup Sollux’s cheek. He leaned into it ever so slightly, passively siphoning the heat of her caste. As her thumb stroked slow lines against his skin, Aradia leaned in more, this time to let their foreheads touch. Allowing some of her weight to rest against him in this way for a moment, she tilted her head down after a couple of seconds to let their noses touch. Even the air she breathed onto him was warmer. Feeling bold, Sollux lifted his free hand and let it reach through air until his fingers felt her side. From there, they wrapped easily around her, moving down to hold her by the hip. For once, he had a mental map of this chaotic force, this whirlwind of excitement and fae dust.

For once, he knew exactly where she was. 

Their lips touched. It was a gentle, chaste kiss, certain of its own boundaries. Her lips were full but dry from forgetting some of the more minor aspects of living maintenance. His were chapped from being pursed too many times from worry, or getting picked at by claws. Neither seemed to matter when they were pressed together.

It only lasted a few seconds, but it may very well have been a lifetime of breathed out words and bloodpusher beats. Aradia’s body tensed, an alert to Sollux that she was about to start moving again-- when she did move to stand up, still holding his hand, he was able to follow smoothly.

“That was awfully flush of you,” Aradia lopsidedly grinned. 

“AA, the quadrants are bullshit,” Sollux sighed. 

“Then it was awfully romantic.”

“Just don’t let it slip to anyone that I’m something other than a vague depressive shape burning a hole through existence.”

“Your secret is safe with me. Now come on!” She smiled more evenly, a broad motion that showed off her blunt teeth. “There’s still so much cavern to experience! I’ll give you the play-by-play, I promise!”

“Alright,” Sollux nodded, squeezing Aradia’s hand. “Lead the way, AA.”

With a dimpled, beaming grin, Aradia began guiding Sollux anew, their footsteps echoing as a single sound.

“Let’s explore!”

**Author's Note:**

> A crystal's habit is the shape that an individual crystal or a crystal group takes. Some habits are unique to a crystal group, and some are unique to where the crystal comes from. Quartzes specifically have an enantiomorphic habit, which means that they engage in crystal-twinning, so yes, Sollux does get represented in the title by the most presumptuous method possible.


End file.
